We all know an Eedy Karn or two. The character, played with brutal wit by esteemed Shakespearean actor Kathryn Hunter, burned up the screen whenever she appeared on Andor’s recently concluded first season. In the Tony Gilroy–created series, Eedy, the mother of disgraced rent-a-cop Syril Karn (the Javert to the title character’s Valjean, played by Kyle Soller), lets her son move into her apartment in the galactic capital, Coruscant, after a deadly series of tactical mistakes on the job. But we get the sense that Eedy, with her endless needling of Syril to accept a job offer from his uncle, is not originally from Coruscant or at least not from the social station in which her son was raised. She’s immediately recognizable as the type of hard-working, razor-sharp, utterly overbearing mom from a marginalized community who gets things done at a cost to her children’s sanity and lords it over them in old age. Following Andor’s season-one finale, as production is ramping up on its second, the classically trained Hunter told Vulture that she sees Eedy as a sympathetic figure — an “overarching mother†but also a “thwarted woman,†a figure who falls somewhere between a Woody Allen character and Lady Macbeth.
What drew you to the character of Eedy initially?
It was, immediately, the quality of the writing. She just leaped off the page totally obviously. I knew her intimately. That’s such a joy, for an actor, where you go, Ah! Of course! It’s a woman who is very thwarted in her own life, so she invests everything in her own son, who is brought into a culture of success and can achieve a life that would be worthwhile for herself or her son. So there’s a kind of great comic tension in Eedy’s neediness. It was immediately appealing: She was outrageous and demanding, and I saw immediately the human and the comic possibilities there.
There’s no right or wrong answer to this, but how Star Wars literate were you prior to working on the show?
Well, I have confessed to Tony that I wasn’t all up on it, I’m afraid. I don’t know why, but it just kind of went in another direction. Of course, once I got involved, I started catching up. Not as much as I would’ve liked to. That’s for various reasons. My husband was very ill and then passed away. But what’s been amazing is being told by people, “This is really special.†People really, really like the series, and it’s nice to hear that.
A lot of people have said, “I recognize Eedy. This is a type of woman I have seen in the world.†Were there any real-life models you drew from to build her?
Of course there were real-life models, and I did a mixture of them. I took a cue from when I worked with Mike Leigh, who’d ask you to come up with, Okay, I have a bit of this person, a bit of that person. I guess that’s how it works: You cook with different ingredients. But she’s so recognizable in many different cultures, I think — the overarching mother, the overprotective mother — for very good reasons. That’s one thing we said with Kyle: We’d laugh at her obsessive, oppressive need to control him. But, at the same time, you understand it. She’s probably a thwarted woman herself, and she’s overcompensating with her son.
I read Eedy as being born somewhere other than Coruscant, away from the center of the galaxy. Or maybe from a different economic class than the one she’s in now. She’s clawed her way to the position she has and wants her son to succeed as well, but that kind of love comes out a little rough at times.
Absolutely. And I must say, it was a joy to see Kyle — we would giggle, we were lucky enough to get along very well as actors. And then, on set, he would completely transform into this thwarted, frozen person. It was really quite miraculous to film.
What impressed you about Kyle as a thespian?
I think it’s that: his complete transformation on set. He’s warm and talkative and communicative, and then, on set, he would just transform into this imprisoned, locked person. It was almost like a shock. He just totally transformed.
What kinds of conversations did you have with Tony Gilroy about the character?
Tony is like a kind of force of nature and inspiration. We had to communicate via phone or Zoom because of COVID, but he made up for that with his passion for the story. He wanted it to be about real people rather than ideas or “epic†things. He was really invested in the detailed psychology of people. He gave something more about the character in every conversation, and that’s a gift for an actor.
What was the biggest challenge of the role?
It was really that we started in the middle of a COVID lockdown. But I have to say that it was such an extraordinary team and an operation, of doing the tech and the safety protocols and the costumes, hair and makeup, wearing masks and visors. And yet there was this strange delight at, We’re making a movie! You know? It was quite a surreal and wonderful time. So it was a challenge, but everybody was on board. There’s a new investment in the work because you’ve been in that prison where everything is locked down, so to come together — with protocols — was quite extraordinary. And Michael Wilkinson, of the extraordinary costume design, I’d never encountered such attention to detail in the look of a costume. Usually, one has a costume given to one, and you just get on with it, but this was very collaborative.
You have a lot of experience in Shakespeare. Is there a Shakespearean character that leaps to mind when you think of Eedy?
Not immediately.
She strikes me as a bit of a Lady Macbeth, but maybe that’s too easy an answer.
Yeah, yeah, except, I guess, there’s a — dare I say it? — Woody Allen kind of “Whaddaya talkin’ about?†irony that Lady Macbeth doesn’t have.
Will we see more of Eedy?
We haven’t started the second series yet, but I went in for costume fittings and said, “Oh, here we go!†It’s a joy to come back to.